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%% Introduction
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%% A Review of the Seventh International Planning Competition
%% AI Magazine
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\section{Introduction}

%% Scott -- Cannot summarize all planning as goal-based, ``objectives'' is better.
Automated Planning is the process of finding an ordered sequence of actions that, starting from a given initial state, allows the transition to a state where a series of objectives are achieved. Actions are usually expressed in terms of preconditions and effects; i.e. the requirements a state must meet for the action to be applied, and the changes subsequently made. Domain-independent planning relies on general problem solving techniques to find an (approximately) optimal sequence of actions and has been the focus of numerous International Planning Competitions (IPCs) over the years.
%% Scott -- this list is highly incomplete, I would omit.
%Most commonly, Heuristic Search is used, but approaches based on Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) and Boolean Satisfiability Problems (SAT) have also been explored.

The first IPC was organised by Drew McDermott in 1998.  For the following 10 years it was a biennial event and remains a keystone in the world-wide planning research community: the most recent, seventh, IPC took place in 2011.  The major important contribution of the first competition was to establish a common standard language for defining planning problems --- the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL)~\cite{mcdermott.d:pddl} --- which has been developed and extended throughout the competition series.  Today, the extended PDDL is still widely used, and is key in allowing fair benchmarking of planners.  Participation has increased dramatically over the years and a growing number of tracks have formed, representing the broadening community --- see Figure~\ref{fig:competitionhistory} for details.  The three main tracks now operating are the Deterministic, Learning and Uncertainty Tracks.

The IPC has two main goals: to produce new benchmarks; and to gather and disseminate data about the current state-of-the-art. Entering a planner represents significant work, and the contribution of all participants in pushing planner development, along with the data gathered, are the major prized value of the competition. The impact of the IPC on the planning and scheduling community is broader than just determining a winner: benchmarking test sets are used for evaluating new ideas, and the defined state-of-the-art, the most recent winner, is a useful benchmark. Typically, entrants in the competition come from academia, though some industrial colleagues have been involved, and industrial sponsorship secured.  The independent assessment of available systems is useful to potential users of planners outside the research community.

%notably David Smith (NASA Ames) and Jana Koehler (Schindler Lifts) can put these back in if we need to but not sure is worth the words!

%AGO: This gives me the idea of participants submitting planners in a
%continuous base, instead of having a fixed deadline to do it
The competition is run by the organisers over a period of several months, with participants submitting their planning systems electronically.  The results of each edition of the competition are presented in a special session of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS\footnote{Videos of the 2011 presentations are at {\scriptsize \url{http://videolectures.net/icaps2011_freiburg/}}}.  The IPC council, chaired by Lee McCluskey, oversee the competition series (and the knowledge engineering competition series ICKEPS) and are seeking chairs for the next competition, expected to take place in 2013. More information about the competition can be found on the IPC\footnote{{\scriptsize \url{http://icaps-conference.org/index.php/Main/Competitions}}} website.


% Do we need this now we have the picture? \footnote{see http://ipc.icaps-conference.org/ for a list of all competitions and organisers}

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